This is the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture where you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music (including of course Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen), film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of…
Culture
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Memo to Michael Steinhardt: ‘Duh.’
This past summer, philanthropist Michael Steinhardt rocked the Jewish institutional world when he announced that he sort of regretted the $125 million he had spent on Jewish causes. “Is the Jewish world any better today than it was 13 years ago? Have things really improved? Are we reaching more people?” Steinhardt asked. “I don’t have…
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Swedish Wish
Reader Debbie Rabina writes: “We have just returned from a family vacation in Sweden, where we spent some enjoyable time in the old city of Stockholm — Gamla Stan. The name immediately brings to mind the site of Gamla on the Golan Heights, and I am curious as to a possible connection between these two…
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October 12, 2007
100 Years Ago in the forward A New York City tenement house on Orchard Street has been in an uproar ever since the building’s housekeeper had one of its more upstanding, but financially unfortunate, tenants, the melamed Nokhem Strauss, evicted. Poor Strauss and his family were forced out onto the street after having had an…
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Music Matisyahu Bids Chabad Adieu
The JTA reports: Orthodox Jewish reggae sensation Matisyahu is leaving the Chabad movement. “I am no longer identified with Chabad,” the American singer told Ha’aretz this week during a private visit to Israel. “Today it’s more important to me to connect to a universal message.” Born Matthew Miller, Matisyahu embraced Orthodox Judaism while studying in…
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Just Say ‘Nu’
Picture me ten years ago, desperate and broke. I’m in an editing suite, watching porn with a producer. “So you see what’s happening here?” he asks. “She’s switched rooms with the rabbi’s wife, but the desk clerk forgot to tell the rabbi. When he comes back at night, he goes straight to the room and…
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Will Eisner’s Life, Drawn by His Own Hand
Life, in Pictures: Autobiographical Stories By Will Eisner, with an introduction by Scott McCloud W.W. Norton & Company, 496 pages, $29.95. In one of many ironies whose origins may be suggested here, artist-entrepreneur Will Eisner died in 2005, just as his collected oeuvre had begun to persuade readers that he was a true master and…
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Setting Celan To Music
The distinguished literary critic George Steiner once described the Romanian Jewish poet Paul Celan as “almost certainly the major European poet of the period after 1945.” That pronouncement has been repeated often over the past decade, as Celan’s poetry has come to greater attention in the United States through a fresh clutch of translations from…
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Reconsidering Reagan at Bitburg
In his innermost thoughts, Ronald Reagan was genuinely friendly toward American Jews. As the recent publications of other former presidents’ private writings and rantings have shown, this is no small thing. The 2003 release of Harry Truman’s diary quoted the 33rd president as writing, “The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish.” Last year, Jimmy…
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New Time Religion
Wrestling With Angels: New and Collected Stories By John J. Clayton The Toby Press, 616 pages, $27.95. Kuperman’s Fire By John J. Clayton The Permanent Press, 304 pages, $28. Jews are at the vanguard of everything happening in America today. Surprisingly, this is still true when it comes to religion. Thanks to technology, or terrorism,…
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Shaping a New Language
For the countries of eastern and east-central Europe, the early decades of the 20th century were a period of enormous ferment in the realms of both politics and design. As Europe’s great empires dissolved, the region’s writers and artists forged a radical new visual language: a geometric lingua franca stretching from Bucharest to Berlin, Tallinn…
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The Absence of ‘Eviction’
The other day I was having an English conversation with an Israeli acquaintance, an observant Jew of American origins, when he casually said, while trying to date something that had happened in his private life some two years ago, “I’m quite sure it was before the expulsion.” For a second, I didn’t know what he…
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Holy Ground A Jewish farmer broke ground on a synagogue in an Illinois cornfield. His neighbors showed up to help.
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